Jennifer Granick fights for civil liberties in an age of massive surveillance and powerful digital technology. As the new surveillance and cybersecurity counsel with the ACLU's Speech, Privacy and Technology Project, she litigates, speaks, and writes about privacy, security, technology, and constitutional rights. Granick is the author of the bookAmerican Spies: Modern Surveillance, Why You Should Care, and What To Do About It, published by Cambridge Press and winner of the 2016 Palmer Civil Liberties Prize.

Granick spent much of her career helping create Stanford Law School’s Center for Internet and Society. From 2001 to 2007, she was Executive Director of CIS and founded the Cyberlaw Clinic, where she supervised students in working on some of the most important cyberlaw cases that took place during her tenure. For example, she was the primary crafter of a 2006 exception to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act which allows mobile telephone owners to legally circumvent the firmware locking their device to a single carrier. From 2012 to 2017, Granick was Civil Liberties Director specializing in and teaching surveillance law, cybersecurity, encryption policy, and the Fourth Amendment. In that capacity, she has published widely on U.S. government surveillance practices, and helped educate judges and congressional staffers on these issues. Granick also served as the Civil Liberties Director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation from 2007-2010. Earlier in her career, Granick spent almost a decade practicing criminal defense law in California.

Granick’s work is well-known in privacy and security circles. Her keynote, "Lifecycle of a Revolution" for the 2015 Black Hat USA security conference electrified and depressed the audience in equal measure. In March of 2016, she received Duo Security’s Women in Security Academic Award for her expertise in the field as well as her direction and guidance for young women in the security industry. Senator Ron Wyden (D-Ore) has called Granick an "NBA all-star of surveillance law.”

Over at Just Security, I have a post about the latest iteration of the USA Freedom Act. Basically, civil liberties groups are withdrawing support for the bill because it no longer clearly ends bulk collection of metadata and other information under Section 215 of the Patriot Act, the NSL statutes, and the intelligence pen/trap statute as the bill was supposed to do. I explain the language changes that gutted the bill, and lament the state of Congress. Read more here.

Yesterday I attended a conference at the Hoover Institution on “Intelligence Challenges.” I also spoke on a panel in the morning about Civil Liberties. A version of my prepared remarks is below. Ben Wittes has an interesting post on the event.

Yesterday afternoon, the White House put out a statement describing its view of vulnerability disclosure: the contentious issue of whether and when government agencies should disclose their knowledge of computer vulnerabilities. Over at Just Security, I highlight some parts of the announcement for further thought.

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Encryption helps human rights workers, activists, journalists, financial institutions, innovative businesses, and governments protect the confidentiality, integrity, and economic value of their activities. However, strong encryption may mean that governments cannot make sense of data they would otherwise be able to lawfully access in a criminal or intelligence investigation.

Arguing that a defendant’s conviction for website hacking should be overturned because legitimate, highly valuable security and privacy research commonly employs techniques that are essentially identical to what the defendant did and that such independent research is of great value to academics, government regulators and the public even when – often especially when — conducted without a website owner’s permission.

Arguing that if the court should not compel Apple to create software to enable unlocking and search of the San Bernardino shooter’s iPhone, it will jeopardize digital and personal security more generally.

After the Estate of James Joyce refused to allow a scholar to quote Joyce in her book, we successfully defended her right under the fair use doctrine to use the quotes she needed to illustrate her scholarship. After we prevailed in the case, the Estate paid $240,000 of our client’s legal fees.

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Opening brief of Movants-Appellants EFF, ACLU, and Riana Pfefferkorn to the Ninth Circuit in our appeal from the district court's denial of our motion to unseal filings in a sealed case wherein the Department of Justice allegedly sought to compel Facebook to comply with a wiretap order for Facebook's end-to-end encrypted voice calling app, Messenger.

Our cars don’t just take us from point A to point B anymore. They now play our favorite Spotify playlists, read us our text messages, and make phone calls. They may collect audio and video inside and outside a car as well as GPS-coordinates.

Brief of amici curiae ACLU, ACLU of Georgia, and Riana Pfefferkorn in support of appellant Victor Mobley in Mobley v. State, a Georgia Supreme Court case presenting the question of whether the Fourth Amendment requires a warrant for the seizure of digital data stored by a vehicle -- specifically, a car's event data recorder (EDR).

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As Jennifer Granick, director of civil liberties at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society, recently wrote: "'Authorization' gives great power to the computer system owner. That entity may unilaterally decide what is right and wrong on their system, and the [Computer Fraud and Abuse Act] brings the full force of federal law behind it. Yet outside of the computer context, crimes punish social wrongs, not merely offenses to personal or business preferences."

"But lost in the praise is the fact that such an amendment wouldn’t necessarily, as Jennifer Granick of the Center for Internet Law and Society observed days ago, have kept Aaron Swartz from being prosecuted."

"The level of precision that satisfies advertisers is very different from the amount of exactitude federal authorities need, said Jennifer Granick, director of civil liberties for Stanford University’s Center for Internet and Society."

"The allegation that his recording of the incident violated HIPAA, or the federal Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, is nonsense, said Jennifer Granick, a specialist on privacy issues at Stanford University Law School."

US intelligence agencies - the eponymous American spies - are exceedingly aggressive, pushing and sometimes bursting through the technological, legal and political boundaries of lawful surveillance. Written for a general audience by a surveillance law expert, this book educates readers about how the reality of modern surveillance differs from popular understanding.

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Jennifer Granick talks about how notions of privacy have changed over the years and where she thinks things are headed in the future. She is a professor at the Stanford School of Law and Director of Civil Liberties at the Center for Internet and Society, where she specializes in the intersection of engineering, privacy and the law.

What kind of surveillance assistance can the U.S. government force companies to provide? This issue has entered the public consciousness due to the FBI's demand in February that Apple write software to help it access the San Bernardino shooter's encrypted iPhone. Technical assistance orders can go beyond the usual government requests for user data, requiring a company to actively participate in the government's monitoring of the targeted user(s).

In this week's feature interview we're chatting with Stanford's very own Jennifer Granick about a recent ruling in a Virginia court that appears to give the FBI permission to hack into any computer it wants, sans warrant. Well that's what the headlines are screaming, anyway. But as you'll hear, it's not quite that black and white.

""What was remarkable was that the public hadn't seen the argument surfaced," says Jennifer Granick at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society. She says Judge Orenstein was trying to stoke a public debate. "Judge Orenstein had concerns about whether the government's legal argument was a valid legal argument."